The Amazon rainforest, energy grids, and cells in the human body share a troublesome property: They possess multiple stable states. When the world's largest tropical forest suddenly starts retreating in a warming climate, ...

Because modern computers have to depict the real world with digital representations of numbers instead of physical analogues, to simulate the continuous passage of time they have to digitize time into small slices. This kind ...

he Arab Spring has turned to winter. A year after protests, demonstrations and uprisings rocked the Arab world, hopes for peaceful transitions and free elections are fading in Egypt, Libya, and especially Syria, while elsewhere ...

(Phys.org)—Earth's magnetism has captured human attention since the first innovator noticed that a freely moving piece of magnetized iron would always align itself with Earth's poles. Throughout most of history, the origins ...

For the first time, the dynamics of how Facebook user communities are formed have been identified, revealing surprisingly few large communities and innumerable highly connected small-size communities. These findings are about ...

(Phys.org)—A team of Brazilian physicists working with neuroscientists studying freely behaving rats have found that their neurons often act in precise coordination over time, in a study about to be published in the European ...

(Phys.org)—Proteins are able to self-assemble into a wide range of highly ordered structures that feature a diverse array of properties. Through biomimicry - technological innovation inspired by nature – humans hope to ...

Complex systems

Complex systems is a scientific field which studies the common properties of systems that are considered fundamentally complex. Such systems may exist in nature, society, science and many other fields. It is also called complex systems theory, complexity science, study of complex systems, sciences of complexity, non-equilibrium physics, and historical physics. The key problems of such systems are difficulties with their formal modeling and simulation. From such perspective, in different research contexts complex systems are defined on the base of their different attributes. Since all complex systems have many interconnected components, the science of networks and network theory are always important aspects of the study of complex systems. At present, the consensus related to one universal definition of complex system does not exist yet.